A photograph of the sky by Trevor Paglen can look like a massive abstraction, except for a tiny speck, a surveillance drone, spotted like a malignant dot on a chest x-ray. His images of secluded military sites in Nevada can also ooze with colour from the churning heat and dust. In the new documentary film Unseen Skies, directed by Yaara Bou Melhem, Paglen calls the effect "impressionistic haze". Photographing those places, often from miles away (or farther), is about "seeing and not seeing at the same time," Paglen says. "For me those images were about capturing that paradox."

With two upcoming exhibitions that center on AI, the multimedia artist is drawing attention to a hidden world of modern phrenology, racist categorizations and the surreality of facial recognition.

I keep thinking of Agnieszka Kurant's liquid crystal paintings. I can't help but wonder if their forms are still changing, their gasoline-rainbow palettes still mutating, or whether they've gone quiet like the rest of us. Kurant's work sits in a central gallery of'Uncanny Valley', the Bay Area's first major exhibition to focus explicitly on how artists today are grappling with technologies that have – for the most part – come out of the region. The show's title is a nod, of course, to nearby Silicon Valley – of which San Francisco has increasingly become an annex – but also reflects the show's intent: to look not broadly at how technology has seeped into art, but at how the definition of what constitutes'humanness' has been blurred by advancements in artificial intelligence and how artists are metabolizing these developments. Kurant's work – which, for me, was the soul of the exhibition – relies heavily on technology that reflects human emotions in real time.

"…we have these incredibly predatory institutions being created, whether it is white supremacy on one hand or Facebook on the other. It is kind of a surrealist moment. Nothing is what it seems." For his new Curve commission, American artist Trevor Paglen invites us to take a critical look at how artificial intelligence networks are taught to'perceive' and'see' the world by engineers who provide them with vast training sets of images and words. For his commission Paglen has created a vast mosaic of approximately 30,000 of these images across 100 categories that charts ImageNet's labelling of the world, moving from uncontroversial nouns such as'cloud', 'anchovy' and'apple', to terms that make problematic and prejudiced visual judgements such as'schemer', 'traitor' and'anomaly'.

Trevor Paglen explores the unseen networks of power that monitor and control us, documenting secret US government bases, offshore prisons and surveillance drones. In the run up to his show at Milan's Fondazione Prada (until 24 February 2020), Paglen collaborated with the artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford to launch ImageNet Roulette, an online interactive project which revealed the often racist or misogynistic ways in which ImageNet--one of the largest online databases that is widely used to train machines how to read pictures--classifies images of people. At London's Barbican, Paglen is again examining ImageNet's classifications, starting from everyday objects like apples and moving towards more abstract concepts to arrive at the category of "anomaly". We spoke to him about surveillance, AI and how we can begin to imagine a different future. The Art Newspaper: In 2015, I joined you on a scuba-diving expedition off the coast of Florida to see the fibre-optic cables that carry internet communications between continents.

The news that Christie's would sell an artwork made by artificial intelligence this October captured worldwide headlines and imaginations alike. Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018), an uncanny, algorithm-created rendering of an aristocratic gentleman, will hit the auction block in New York with an estimate of $7,000 to $10,000. But the piece's inclusion in such a high-profile sale is creating controversy far ahead of the auction itself. While images generated using AI technology have been circulating relatively widely since Google's pattern-finding software DeepDream roared onto the scene in 2015, the field was still young, and the artworks produced via AI were neither aesthetically nor conceptually rich enough to hold the attention of the art world for long. But after the heavyweight auction house announced it was ready to sell this latest work, the mysterious portrait--and the even more mysterious algorithm behind it--were cast by many in the media as the new standard-bearers for the genre.

This performance by Trevor Paglen explores the way machines see and interpret the experience of watching a musical performance. Kronos Quartet will perform works ranging from Baroque composer J. S. Bach to contemporary minimalist composers Terry Riley and Steve Reich, and American blues to African folk music. A live video feed of the performance will be processed in real time through surveillance AI algorithms, and the resultant machine vision data images will be projected on a screen above the performers. Sight Machine is organized by the Cantor Arts Center. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Palmer Gross Ducommon Fund and from our partners: Meyer Sound, Obscura Digital, Orton Development, and Plant Construction.

"I was looking at a lot of different human activities that when seen through machines really encapsulate that contradiction, and I found that music is one of the most compelling things. When you hear music, it goes right to an emotional level. When a computer tries to interpret someone playing music, it doesn't get it." Paglen devised a program that combines the human and machine experiences. The Kronos Quartet's 12-song set will be filmed in front of a live audience.